Silent Classics Featuring Live Accompaniment by
Alloy Orchestra
October 20–22

"The best in the world at accompanying silent films." — Roger Ebert

About Alloy Orchestra
Alloy Orchestra is a three-man musical ensemble that writes and performs live accompaniment to classic silent films. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources. Performing at prestigious film festivals and cultural centers in the U.S. and
abroad (Telluride Film Festival, the Louvre, Lincoln Center, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Gallery of Art and others), Alloy Orchestra has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era.

This was the film that launched Josef von Sternberg's career. Ben Hecht, who wrote the screenplay, won the first ever Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story (among his uncredited collaborators were Howard Hawks and von Sternberg). "Bull" Weed (George Bancroft) is the high-living kingpin of
Prohibition Chicago. When a rival gangster (Fred Kohler) puts the moves on Weed's girl (Evelyn Brent), the criminal code demands retaliation. A favorite of audiences and critics alike, UNDERWORLD is credited as the first gangster film, and the model for the popular genre.

This film won lead actor Emil Jannings (THE LAST LAUGH, FAUST, THE BLUE ANGEL), the first-ever Best Actor award at the inaugural 1929 Academy Awards. A general in Czarist Russia, Jannings is disgraced after falling in love with a beautiful Bolshevik (Evelyn Brent) and imprisoning her paramour (William Powell of THE THIN MAN fame). A decade later and a world away, the general is now living in exile in Los Angeles, a broken man. There he finds work as a film extra in the burgeoning film colony, where he is "discovered" — in a dual sense of the word — by his old enemy William Powell, now a filmmaker.

Featuring Alloy Orchestra's newest score, hot off its world premiere performance at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival! An avant-garde, expressionistic take on the Gogol source material, directed by visionary filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev (whose landmark Shakespeare adaptations HAMLET [1964] and KING LEAR [1971] were recently shown at AFI Silver). Andrei Kostrichkin gives a brilliant performance as the put-upon clerk whose worldly ambitions find single-minded focus in a new overcoat, only to discover that clothes both make — and unmake — the man.

Dziga Vertov's groundbreaking experimental documentary about Soviet life is also a treatise on filmmaking. Amazingly filmed and astonishingly edited, MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA remains fresh and exciting today. Banned in the Soviet Union, it has since become one of the most celebrated and influential films of all time. Often cited as Alloy Orchestra's best score.